Six Great R&B Love Songs That You Might Hear On The Radio Sometime Today

Over the weekend a lot of my Facebook friends reposted a CNN piece called "Where Is The Love In R&B?" that served as a sort of lengthy "get off my lawn with your sex and hedonism" diatribe; while it's undoubtedly true that commercial radio is more crass today than it was back in the era of WPIX playing nothing but love songs, the piece was not without its many issues, from citing that awfully flawed study about the narcissism in popular music that was floating around earlier this year to blaming the rise of the laptop musician for the nosedive in songs the writer saw as romantic. (Not to mention that it took Miguel's ode to getting off "Quickie" to task while failing to notice that his screwed-down fidelity pledged had actually performed better on the airplay-based R&B chartby topping it.) What better day than today, which marks the release of Robin Thicke's super-uxorious, quite fantastic Love After War, to rebut the claims about R&B being a complete wasteland? Six tracks from this year that made the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop charts and that will melt even the coldest heart (take it from someone who knows!) below.

Fact: The rolling key changes at the end are one of theif not thebest purely musical displays of falling deeper and deeper in love with someone to be put to wax this year. (Hey, there's a reason gear-shifting works.)

The blooming synths underneath Roberson's handclap-assisted outpouring of love eventually narrow into a sine-wave keyboard solo at the end, one that is probably designed to represent Roberson's target's acquiescence to the fact that he finds her absolutely stunning.

I have a pretty strong pro-Lloyd critical bias, it's true. But this sweeter-than-sweet treatise on what it's like to let oneself fall into infatuation with someone new for the first time never fails to make me smileits booming bass recalls a heart excitedly thudding in one's chest, and Lloyd's vocal delivery further underscores the feelings of delight and optimism that go hand-in-hand with romance's first blushes.